Boys Will Be Girls

The making of Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot."

One morning in the summer of 1950, Billy Wilder was sitting alone, eating breakfast and reading the Hollywood Reporter. His wife, Audrey, came into the room and asked:

“Do you know what day this is, dear?”

“June 30th.”

“It's our anniversary.”

“Please,” Wilder said, “not while I'm eating.”

And there you have him. Like most Wilder anecdotes, this tale has been told many times, and we have gone beyond the point of being able to ascertain whether it might actually be true. I guess you could ask the man himself, who is still alive at the age of ninety-five, but that would be no help; when it comes to spinning webs of Wilder mythology, he is by far the worst and most enjoyable offender. (Who else, reliving his career as a cub reporter in Vienna, would claim to have interviewed Richard Strauss, Arthur Schnitzler, and Sigmund Freud on a single day?) Still, if the facts don't fit the legend, print the legend and to hell with it; what matters about the breakfast story is that it sounds right—the wisecrack zipping across the room and drowning the crunch of toast.

And so the rumors accrue, hardening the image of Wilder the cynic, Wilder the man-hater and woman-scorner. Who else would bother to assert that his bad back, which has plagued him throughout his career, was brought on by an urge to make love in Viennese doorways, standing up? More to the point, who else would say so in front of his wife? Wilder was one of those steely souls, forged in the Hollywood of the thirties and forties, who were even tougher than the actors they were slated to direct. In 1960, the year of “The Apartment,” he looked back on the duties of his chosen profession: “A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard.” It's not affection that Wilder minds, I would imagine, but the fuss that is made of it—the anniversaries, the flowers, the song and dance. “Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you,” Jack Lemmon says, soft as a puppy, in the closing moments of “The Apartment.” But Shirley MacLaine is having none of it: “Shut up and deal,” she replies, addressing herself to the more pressing matter of gin rummy. She adores the guy, of course, and she has just run uptown to tell him so, but, still, there are limits. You have to keep the puppy on a leash.

There is only one catch in the Wilder world—not even a catch, perhaps, but an irony that is strong enough to crack his cool. People love his movies. Needless to say, Wilder himself had an explanation for this, as he did for everything else. “You know how it is,” he told reporters in London in 1961. “You hate your dentist while he's pulling your teeth out, but the next week you're playing golf with him.” Over and over, Wilder shows us mankind behaving badly, or using one another as props and pawns, or racing into follies from which there is no escape, and still, like sheep to the shearer, we come back for more. “Double Indemnity,” “The Seven Year Itch,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Apartment”: these are part of the basic lexicon of moviegoing. One picture, in particular, has become an icon. Last year, the American Film Institute invited its members to vote on the hundred best comedies ever made. The top spot went to Billy Wilder's “Some Like It Hot” (1959).

Everyone knows that these hundred-best lists are a bore. Not a fix, exactly, although the film crowd, like all social groups who are presented with a questionnaire, tends to repeat the conventional wisdom without troubling to think it through. Still, it would take a brave critic to dispute the status of “Some Like It Hot,” just as it would take a historian of the highest subtlety and resourcefulness to explain, before a tribunal of his peers, why the most entertaining cultural spectacle of the last hundred years has been, by common consent, a pair of full-grown American males wearing falsies.

Falsehood, it must be said, is the fuel of this famous movie. It is rabid with deception, and all attempts to summarize the plot tend to skip one of the changes of costume, or of heart; not until I saw the film again recently, perhaps for the tenth time, did I notice that Jack Lemmon turns briefly into a bellhop. The roughest of outlines would go as follows: A pair of small-time jazz musicians—Joe, a tenor-sax player (Tony Curtis), and Jerry, a bassist (Lemmon)—are accidental witnesses to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Pursued by a big-time gangster (George Raft) and his hoods, they dress as women and join an allgirl band on a train to Florida. There Joe, who has become Josephine, makes one more switch, pretending to be an oil baron in order to woo the band's singer, Sugar Cane (Marilyn Monroe), née Kowalczyk. And Jerry, who has become Daphne, draws the attention of the insatiable Osgood (Joe E. Brown), a bona-fide millionaire with a mouth like a mailbox. It all ends well, with both couples heading for a moonlit yacht.

What more is there to say? Many filmgoers can recite lines from this picture more fluently than they can tell a story from their own past. The closing zinger—Daphne yanking off her wig and declaring herself to be a man, and Osgood replying, “Nobody's perfect,” his beatific randiness intact—is the kind of thing that compilers of movie quotations slap on the covers of their books. Meanwhile, the traditional Wilder mischief has calcified into received opinion; when he said that Marilyn Monroe had breasts like granite and a brain like Swiss cheese, he must have realized that the line—one part idolatry to three parts slur—was here to stay, and it is true that Monroe's bosom, thrust in and out of the spotlight as she sings “I Wanna Be Loved by You” and “I'm Through with Love,” has become as proud a feature of the American landscape as Mt. Rushmore. In fact, the whole film is a national treasure; you can look at it, but you can't touch.

Now a new angle has opened up. Just one warning: it'll cost you. A hundred and fifty dollars, to be precise, for which you get a book. “Billy Wilder's 'Some Like It Hot' ” is the size of an old electric typewriter, and it weighs more than many common domestic animals. Spookier still, it is furrier than many common domestic animals, being covered in a lightly padded velvet the color of crème pâtissière. The title is picked out in orange leather lettering, as bold as a billboard, on the front cover; inside, you get colored production stills, dripping with Florida sunshine, plus full-page blowups of pencilled lines from the screenplay, and the effect is to seize an unsuspecting black-and-white comedy and propel it toward the status of Pop art. There are many books devoted to single films, but they tend to be unsmiling monographs, neatly nailing the work in question to the social history of its era; this book, by contrast, is more like one of Osgood's laughs—sinful, delirious, and loaded.

The publisher of this unusual volume is Taschen, which explains a lot. Benedikt Taschen is an outspoken German who started producing books in 1981, and who has since built up a catalogue so hip, so huge, and so hungry for taboo that you see people in Barnes & Noble make a beeline for the Taschen table and then sneak a glance around the store to make sure that nobody is looking. It goes without saying that you can't open a work entitled “1000 Dessous: A History of Lingerie” without being tapped on the shoulder by your fourth-grade teacher, whom you haven't seen in thirty years, and who once taught you the names of her favorite flowers. The thing about Taschen is that even the books that are about flowers bear a distinct fragrance of perversion; this fall sees the publication of “A Garden Eden: Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration,” and a brief glance suggests that all those thrusting pistils should give the antique girdles and stockings a run for their money.

The Wilder book is split into three acts. The first section delves into the making of the movie and contains a facsimile of the final script, on aging buff paper, complete with holes punched at the edge. The second section is a sheaf of interviews with, among others, Wilder, Curtis, Lemmon, and Barbara Diamond, the widow of I. A. L. Diamond—Iz to his friends, and the co-writer on the movie. Diamond had no better friend than Wilder, nobody better qualified to match his smarts; as a team, they wrote a dozen films. (“Never a harsh word, twenty-five years of working together,” Wilder once said, at a lecture. “We were like bank tellers.” They finished the screenplay of “Some Like It Hot” four days before the end of the shoot.) The interviews are new, conducted over the last couple of years. This doesn't mean that the material itself is new—all concerned have taken the opportunity to buff their anecdotes, like silver, over time—but it's useful to find it packaged together, and even Wilder scholars should rejoice to find Tony Curtis, especially, in such brazen form. You can hear the wide Brooklyn bark as he remembers, only too vividly, the professional drag queen whom Wilder flew in from Berlin to act as tutor to his leads:

This guy told us to keep the cheeks of your ass tight. You tighten up—which you did if you were in the Navy anyway—and make one step good before the other. So when we started to put it together, it all became a very charming manner. I loved it . . . Jack was outrageous as a girl, he couldn't wait to go tromping out. I was more hesitant, I was more like Grace Kelly than like my mother. I was on track.

What's sweet about these recollections is that Curtis plainly took a genuine pride in his womanly appearance; even now, the wording (“a very charming manner”) retains a feminine correctness that borders on the prim. Or at least it does until he gets to Marilyn's door, and to the little tailor who was busy with his tape measure, checking the statistics of the stars:

Anyway, he measured me, 16, 34, 43, 18, 19, 18 . . . and then he goes to Marilyn, this is all in the same day and this is the truth . . . He comes in to Marilyn's room and Marilyn had on a pair of panties and a white blouse and that's all. He put the tape around her legs, looked up at Marilyn and said, “You know, Tony Curtis has got a better-looking ass than you.” She was standing there, she unbuttoned her blouse and said, “He doesn't have tits like these.”

For once, I think we need these salty stories, because Monroe needs all the salt she can get. The Marilyn industry is so deeply soaked in her crackups—shaking the poor woman until we can hear the slosh of booze and the rattle of pills—that it's sobering to get back to the floozie with the forked tongue. If “Some Like It Hot” remains her best as well as her most celebrated film, that is because Wilder was lucky enough, and perceptive enough, to catch Marilyn when her balance was still intact. Wilder knew precisely how good a comedian she was, he knew the ratio of bite to fluff, and he saw that her pathos—which the public, avid for the crash of failing marriages, was increasingly keen to ascribe to her—wasn't worth a damn unless it came wrapped in shining lines. “That's the story of my life: I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop” is dangerously close to one of Marilyn's private confessions, but Wilder and Diamond give the image such a lick and a twist that it slots quite happily into the given scene—Sugar Cane chatting to the new girls on the train heading south, and taking a slug from the flask of bourbon that she keeps tucked into her garter. Shortly afterward, she jumps into bed with Jack Lemmon, just for comfort. Both are in nightgowns:

SUGAR: When I was a little girl, on cold nights like this, I used to crawl into bed with my sister. We'd cuddle up under the covers, and pretend we were lost in a dark cave, and were trying to find our way out. JERRY: (mopping his brow) Interesting.

It's only when you read this in the Taschen book, as part of the printed screenplay, that you realize how fantastically dirty it is. (Dirtier, indeed, than it plays onscreen, where Lemmon adds a “very” and froths the line up with a giggle.) Somehow, under the camouflage of a joke, Wilder got that dark-cave stuff past the censors; if challenged, presumably, he could always claim to be unwise in the ways of symbolism. A lollipop was just a thing you sucked.

Taschen saves the best for last. The third section is a roundup of the global reaction to the movie, including a Mexican poster for “Una Eva y Dos Adanes” and a newspaper clipping announcing that, whatever some might like, it was too damn hot for the state of Kansas. (The authorities wanted to cut the smooch on the yacht between Curtis and Monroe, in which he feigns impotence and invites her to cure it, but United Artists said no.) Finally, tucked into the inside of the back cover is a scrappy-looking notebook: an exact reproduction of Marilyn's own shooting script. It is not very long—it contains only her lines, with the ends of the lines that precede them, so as not to confound her—and scrawled here and there are her frazzled, misspelled comments and jabs of self-persuasion: “what am I doing,” “inocent,” “Acting being private in public to be Brave.” On the front, she put her name and address—”MARiLYN MONROE, GoLdWyN Studios, N. FORMOSA,” in case the book got lost. Or, more likely, in case she got lost. Once, when filming “The Seven Year Itch,” she arrived at eleven o'clock for an eight-thirty start; when Wilder wanted to know what had happened, she replied that she couldn't find the studio. “She'd only been under contract for six years,” Wilder said later, with one of his dry grins. A particular line reading for “Some Like It Hot” required eighty-three takes, at the end of which he told Marilyn not to worry. “Worry about what?” she asked.

That sublime question hovers in the air, whenever “Some Like It Hot” is showing, as blithely as a bird. It's as if Wilder were daring us to give him a list of things—the dreadful evidence of the world—that are worthy of significant worry, and then swatting them aside. Remember, this is a film that looks on as a line of thugs commit multiple murder in a Chicago garage; Wilder shows only the thugs, however, not the jerking bodies, and thus gives us leave to laugh. The picture begins in death, with a respectful shot of a hearse, and ends in a double helping of love. Ed Sikov, in his clever, compendious biography of Wilder, quotes the director in one of his milder moods: “Movies should be like amusement parks. People should go to them to have fun.”

The fun in Billy Wilder feels like an attack; sleeping around the office was never quite the same after “The Apartment,” which—contrary to the charges of misogyny that have been laid at Wilder's door—passes much harder sentence on the guys than on the dolls. Yet, the more you learn of Wilder, the more you wonder whether his dialogue, as black and gleaming as wet ink, might not have been his first line of defense. Like half the great American directors, he was the pure product of Europe. Humphrey Bogart, who didn't take to Wilder on the set of “Sabrina,” labelled him a “Prussian German.” Even by Bogie's standards, this was wide of the mark, since Wilder was born a Polish Jew. He lived in Krakow, Vienna, and Berlin, where he made his name writing screenplays. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Wilder moved to Paris: “It seemed the wise thing for a Jew to do.” Less than a year later, as if the needle of his talent were seeking magnetic north, he came to America, bearing, according to Ed Sikov, copies of “Babbitt,” “A Farewell to Arms,” and “Look Homeward, Angel,” and the sum of eleven dollars.

In 1945, he returned to Europe, in the uniform of a colonel; he was working for the Psychological Warfare Division, and one of his duties was to view and cut the footage that was coming in from the concentration camps. This was then shown to German audiences. He also had to screen performers for the revival of cultural events, a task that came to a head when Anton Lang, who had played the part of Christ in the Passion Play at Oberammergau before the war, and who had since joined the S.S., requested permission to take up the role once more. On one condition, Wilder said: “Use real nails.” It may be disconcerting to find one-liners flourishing, even at their bitterest, in such ruined soil, but it is equally presumptuous to push the matter further; as far as Billy Wilder knows, his mother, stepfather, and grandmother died at Auschwitz, and nobody can tell such a man how he should or should not respond. If his first film after the war, a Tyrolian fantasy called “The Emperor Waltz,” starring Bing Crosby in lederhosen, seems almost pathological in its urge to ignore suffering, so be it. With time, it seems that Wilder has returned to the scene of those crimes: he tried to buy the rights to the Thomas Keneally novel “Schindler's List,” and there was even talk of his emerging from retirement to direct. When Spielberg's film was released, Wilder approved, and he used the occasion to write an article for a German newspaper, posing a quiet, unanswerable question to those who were tempted to doubt the existence of the Holocaust: “If the concentration camps and the gas chambers were all imaginary, then please tell me—where is my mother?”

For fans of his work, it is legitimate to ask whether Wilder's restive habits—the migrations of an orphaned cosmopolitan—somehow find their way into the movies. The heroes and heroines in his films may not go in for many changes of scenery, but is there not something obsessive in the ease, or the eagerness, with which they shift the landscape of their own lives, as if preparing at any instant to flee? First up is Ginger Rogers, who adopts the not altogether credible disguise of a twelve-year-old girl in “The Major and the Minor” (1942), Wilder's first film as an American director. Then we have Franchot Tone in “Five Graves to Cairo” (1943), pretending to be a waiter and being mistaken for a spy; Audrey Hepburn in “Love in the Afternoon” (1957), the ingénue who poses as a fur-lined sophisticate in the hope of snaring Gary Cooper; virtually the entire cast of “The Apartment” (1960), followed by Jack Lemmon again, in “Irma La Douce” (1963), playing a lowly French cop who passes himself off as an English lord. Finally, and most acridly, there is Kim Novak in “Kiss Me, Stupid” (1964), the hooker who becomes a temporary wife.

Wilder is not the first person to connect comedy with a taste for subterfuge, as anyone familiar with “Twelfth Night” can confirm. And Shakespeare has nothing to brag about, either, given that he lifted half the plot of “The Comedy of Errors” from a play by Plautus written in around 200 B.C. All we can say is that, if Wilder had a vested interest in shape-shifting, “Some Like It Hot” brings that interest to the boil. Joe and Jerry are not so much characters as quick-change artists with good musical technique, and the fluidity of their self-invention, like their sense of rhythm, confronts our feelings of dullness and stolidity and merrily blows them away. When they first decide to dress as women, the camera honors the outrageousness of the plan: no kooky shots of waxing and padding, no closeups of wig tape and tweezers, just a straight, no-bullshit cut to the railroad station and a hearty couple of broads. Wilder has always scorned what he calls the “fancy-schmancy,” and “Some Like It Hot” takes a convoluted problem and lays it on us straight.

That is why all efforts to tease a deeper entanglement from Wilder's manic film are fated to fail. I looked up “Some Like It Hot” in a chunky, five-volume work entitled “International Dictionary of Films and Film-Makers,” and came across these words:

When Joe tries to assert his masculinity with Sugar, Jerry insists he maintain his female identity. Aware of their dilemma, our pleasure becomes dependent on the ramifications of gender identification and sexual exposure.

As Osgood would say, “Zowie!” In fact, “Some Like It Hot” has almost nothing to tell us about transvestism, and surprisingly few suggestions on the topic of homosexuality. It really is about two men who put on women's clothes to save their skins, and it was part of Wilder's genius that he encouraged his leading men to push their faux girlishness in opposite directions—Curtis toward the demure, Lemmon head first into the lubricious and the loud. That way, we get no single statement on the pathology of cross-dressing, and we soon realize that we don't need one. Remember their heated exchange after Jerry gets engaged to Osgood:

JOE: Why would a guy want to marry a guy? JERRY: Security.

Lemmon really whacks that second syllable, and backs it up with a sharp shiver of his maracas. (Wilder devised them as a prop; he needed something for Lemmon to be doing while the audience laughed, so that Curtis's next straight line would not get buried. Get that for confidence.) Jerry isn't lying, but he's not gay, either; strangely, “Some Like It Hot” only becomes truly fraught with sexual confusion if you try to decide what will happen after the end of the picture. Imagine all four of them chasing each other around the fo'c'sle.

So where does that leave Osgood's final, contented dictum: “Nobody's perfect”? As a universal truth, a withering Wilder glance at life beyond the movie theatre, it remains unimpeachable. As a wrap-up for “Some Like It Hot,” however, it's less of a sure thing. Inside this picture, everybody is perfect. It goes without saying that nobody is good or morally deserving, unless you count the crumbling Sugar, yet all the dizzy men and women on display are allowed to fulfill the essential duties of their nature, to act as we would want them to act, and more than that we surely cannot ask. Wilder has often been disdained by critics for his misanthropy, a complaint that strikes me as absurd; if we were to start striking artists off the list because of the attitudes they happen to hold toward humanity, we would be left with very few. For one thing, there would be piles of Flaubert burning in the street. More pertinent is the question of what Wilder does with this narrow-eyed suspicion of his fellow-men, and the most vigorous reply is made by “Some Like It Hot.” The movie holds itself between a sober recognition that none of us can be trusted and the more spirited, even stirring sight of lovers straining every sinew to break the cycle of disenchantment and keep their ridiculous promises. If that sounds tricky, you try straining a sinew in heels.

All of which means that “Some Like It Hot” is an object of beauty. Comedies, under Hollywood law, are not supposed to be beautiful, but Wilder's film, like “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Apartment,” finds a balance between hope and despair, and that in turn translates into a Viennese play of shadow and gleam. (“I hate color,” Wilder said, adding, “Even words sound phony when the picture is in color.”) When the upright citizens of Kansas tried to ban “Some Like It Hot” because of the scene on the yacht, they didn't know what they were missing: not merely Monroe's astounding backless dress but the enticing glitter when she turns off the lamp—a thousand points of light, reflecting off the dress and the shelf of sporting trophies at the side. She is a trophy, too, but the gorgeousness of the scene makes her momentarily more precious than even Joe, with his fogged spectacles, could possibly know. Likewise, when Sugar thinks she has lost her millionaire, she takes her sadness out on a song, “I'm Through with Love,” and Wilder lets her long vibrato—”For I must have you-oo-oo or no one”—ring and ripple around the movie, as if it could halt the merry-go-round of constant pursuit, and as if her yearning were more than a silly crush. The happy endings of “Some Like It Hot” and “The Apartment” are not tacked on as an afterthought or a sop; they inform us that good fortune, including the luck of requited love, cannot be relied upon to arrive like a train. It can only be grabbed in passing, at the last gasp.

Billy Wilder knows what happiness is; he once defined it as having a doctor who smokes four packs a day. When the profits of “Some Like It Hot” came in, he himself was handed $1.2 million, which in 1960 was a lot of dough. He bought himself two Paul Klees, an Egon Schiele, and a couple of Braques, to go with his Balthus and his Matisse: happiness you can stare at. Almost three decades later, he was asked, in all seriousness, whether he would have made movies if he hadn't been paid to do so. And Wilder, the man who has told more cold truths than many of us would care to hear, didn't hesitate for a second: “What do you think, I'm a sucker?” ♦